Shortly after taking office in 2021, Webster County Sheriff Luke Fleener noticed a line item on his department’s budget with an alarming number of zeroes following the first digit.

It was the cost that the county was paying to house Webster County Jail inmates in other county jails because the existing jail on the third floor of the Law Enforcement Center lacks the capacity to hold everyone in the jail’s custody.

This year, that line item is set for $373,000. That’s more than a third of a million dollars of Webster County taxpayer funds being paid out to other counties in the area.

In the last five years, Webster County has spent more than $1.4 million to house inmates in other jails, a number that includes the cost of the two deputies who are on the road daily transporting inmates to and from court hearings and medical appointments, as well as the fuel costs and wear and tear on the transport vehicles.

“And that’s probably a conservative number,” Fleener said at an Oct. 1 informational meeting on the proposed jail. “It probably costs a little more than that in five years.”

Fleener said he approached the Webster County Board of Supervisors about two years ago to launch a study of whether the existing jail is meeting the county’s needs and what solutions are viable to fix the problem.

“The money that’s in the budget of the Sheriff’s Office that we’re outsourcing for all these [inmates] is just unsustainable,” Fleener said. “For years to come, whether it’s in my tenure as the sheriff or the next person that’s there, the budget of the county cannot continue to do that.”

That jail study, commissioned from The Samuels Group, a consulting firm from West Des Moines that specializes in government facilities like county jails, showed a myriad of problems with the existing facility, including the issue of overcrowding.

The existing jail, which was built with the LEC in 1982, can house up to 56 inmates and has a footprint of less than 10,000 square feet. However, due to inmate classifications (violent, non-violent, etc.) and potential inmate conflicts (gang affiliations or co-defendants), the jail isn’t always able to hold 56 inmates.

As of Tuesday, 18 Webster County inmates are being housed elsewhere. Of the total number of inmates currently in custody, 12 are charged with violent crimes, according to Fleener.

The Webster County Sheriff’s Office is charged $60-$100 per day per inmate housed out of the county. In September 2023 alone, Webster County paid $19,000 to other counties to house overflow inmates.

On a nearly weekly basis, Fleener said, he has to send a list of the inmates to the Webster County Attorney’s Office to ask which inmates seem least likely to reoffend and can be released to make space for new arrests.

Fleener has said that some of the “troublemakers” in Webster County have caught wind of that and know that for some offenses, they’re not likely to be arrested, so they keep committing crimes.

The jail’s capacity shortfalls doesn’t only affect inmates who are awaiting trial. For many misdemeanors, a judge will sentence a defendant to serve a few days, a few weeks or even a few months in jail for that offense. When there isn’t enough space for even the pre-trial inmates, there certainly isn’t enough space for sentenced inmates.

Currently there are just over 1,000 people who are waiting to serve time they’ve been sentenced to. That waiting list is at least five years long, Fleener said. People will call in all the time to ask if there’s space so they can serve their short sentences and close out their cases, but jail staff have to turn them away.

That’s also a huge chunk of money that the county could be collecting. Inmates serving sentences for convictions are required to pay $100 per day in housing costs. With those 1,000 plus individuals and their 7,398 days of sentences, that’s nearly $740,000 waiting to be collected. Those individuals’ cases also remain open in the courts until their sentences are discharged.

The proposed 60,692-square-foot facility that would house both the jail and the Sheriff’s Office, is the solution to the county’s overcrowded jail problem, the study by The Samuels Group concluded.

The proposed facility would have 61 general population cells double-bunked and eight special needs cells with one bunk, totaling 130 beds. It would also include space for jail administration, Sheriff’s Office administration, patrol, investigations and civil processing.

To pay for the construction of the facility and the acquisition of the land on which to build, a $45.5 million 20-year general obligation bond referendum will be on the Nov. 7 ballot.

The Samuels Group has launched a website, www.webstercountyvote.com, to educate voters on the proposal. Voters can also go to the website to calculate the exact impact they would see on their property taxes if the referendum passes. The dates and times of public informational meetings are also listed on the website.

At the informational meetings on the jail referendum, Fleener has assured residents that regardless of how the vote goes, he and his department will keep running the Webster County Jail to the best of their ability with the resources they have — which will almost certainly mean continuing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money to outsource jail inmates.

Have any questions you want answered about the proposed jail project or the Nov. 7 bond referendum? Email kwingert@messengernews.net.